


When the Wolf Comes Home

by queensmooting



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Gen, Post - A Dance With Dragons, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-06-10 11:03:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6953902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queensmooting/pseuds/queensmooting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They never used to be close. Sansa wonders if there’s a part of Jon that still holds it against her, even now, when all they have is each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Wolf Comes Home

**Author's Note:**

> for the sake of this au pretend that meli's already resurrected jon and the battle of ice has already been fought and ramsay got destroyed and sansa's reclaimed winterfell but littlefinger's p much pulling the strings, OR WHATEVER, this is just an excuse to write jon and sansa
> 
> title is from the mountain goats because i can't think for myself. this is for my nemesis, who dragged me back into asoiaf hell and knows who she is. love you loser
> 
> lesbiansashablouse.tumblr.com

There’s a moment when Jon first steps outside the gate and Sansa wonders if her eyes can be trusted. The sun reflects off the snow so brightly it sets his black hair on fire, a spark of near-Tully red. Her breath catches like there’s a hand around her throat. For a beat of her skittering heart, she forgets Robb is gone.

Then he steps closer, into a shadow, and he’s grown so much she’s reminded of her father. He’s short for a man nearly grown, like Lord Eddard was, but broad-shouldered beneath his furs.

She was going to be strong as her mother taught her. Then he says her name, two syllables in the snow. Then he’s all Jon, and her dignity is cast away like a cloak. Her brother’s voice has deepened but beneath it’s all familiar cadence. Something breaks in her, folds toward him like a wave returning to the sea.

She’s been lost for so long. She hadn’t realized, not until now, with her brother sweeping her into his arms and her face buried in the fur of his cloak. She was home again.

*

“You haven’t stopped staring at me,” Jon says.

He only looks mildly amused but Sansa glances down anyway, focusing on Ghost’s head in her lap. Jon’s chambers are as warm as anywhere in Castle Black, but the direwolf’s weight is a welcome addition.

“It’s the thing on your face,” she says, tapping her chin.

Jon frowns, the sight so familiar that a sob rises in her throat. She puts a hand to her mouth to trap it there, let it flutter in hiding.

“You never could take a joke,” she says when she can speak again.

“I’ve gotten better,” he mumbles, but scratches at the scraggly beginnings of beard on his jaw.

She wants to tug at a lock of his long hair, to continue teasing him, but suddenly feels shy. They never used to be close. Sansa wonders if there’s a part of Jon that still holds it against her, even now, when all they have is each other.

There’s a knock at the door, then a young man enters with a serving pitcher.

“Thank you, Satin,” Jon says, gesturing toward the table.

Sansa’s skin creeps as she watches the young man approach, but it takes her a moment to realize why. Something in his curls, the girlish movement of his hips, reminds her of Marillion. She’s thankful when he goes, leaving them alone again.

Jon doesn’t touch the pitcher. He watches the flex of Sansa’s hand, scratching Ghost behind the ears.

“Your wolf,” Jon says. “Lady? She’s not with you.”

Sansa’s embarrassed, even now, to feel a hot prickle behind her eyes. She wonders how many years it will take for the pain to dull. If she still grieves for her direwolf, how long before she stops grieving her father? Her mother, her lost siblings?

She lowers her head, and doesn’t need to answer.

“I’m sorry,” Jon says.

“Father had to do it,” Sansa says. “The queen forced him. I was so angry with him, Jon. I hated him for it, and–I was so stupid, I thought I could save him. He must have thought I’d be glad he was dead.”

Jon doesn’t interrupt, watches her with patience and something too caring to be pity.

“He knows you didn’t hate him,” he says. “You were his daughter. You tried to save his life. Nothing changes that.”

Sansa nods, grips Ghost’s fur loosely, an anchor.

“We loved him,” she says.

“We did.”

With their shared thoughts between them the silence stretches, becomes nearly comfortable, a nest she could settle in. Then there’s another knock, and this time a wild-looking, red-haired man enters. He whispers fast in Jon’s ear. Jon listens, then stands.

“I have a meeting,” he says. “You’ll be alright here?”

Sansa smiles, gestures down to Ghost. “I’ll be fine.”

 _He’s become a leader_ , Sansa thinks, admiring the way he carries himself out the door, straight-backed as their father.

*

“There’s more to why you’re here. Isn’t there.”

There’s no question in Jon’s voice. Sansa fidgets with the fingers of her leather gloves. There are hollow clangs of metal from the men training below. When she closes her eyes, she could be young again, eager to see her brothers duel for the hand of some imaginary maiden. She wonders if Jon, too, hears Robb in the clash of false steel. She wonders if Jon sees him in the half-melted drops of snow on the wood railing, in the flashes of fire that dance toward the sky.

“From what I know of Lord Baelish,” Jon says carefully, “he isn’t the type to send a girl to her brother out of the kindness of his heart.”

“No,” Sansa says, a little too quickly.

Her gloves are too large, and she pinches the loose leather between two fingers, feels grounded in the way it gives beneath her nail. At her brother’s side Sansa feels secure for the first time in years. She doesn’t want to return to Lord Baelish so quickly, even in her thoughts.

“Can you tell me?” Jon asks.

“He has a theory,” Sansa says slowly.

She pauses and glances around, a reflexive twitch she’s developed in the last year, like there’s always been someone watching over her shoulder.

“About your mother. And…about your father.”

Jon’s brow furrows, and she thinks he’s far too young to look like this.

“You mean our father?” he asks.

Sansa looks away, already troubled by the conversation.

“He believes Lord Eddard may not have been your father. He said a lot of things, nonsense really. But he believes he may find an answer within Winterfell. Lord Baelish, depending on what he finds, he…he thinks he may have use of you.”

“Is that so,” Jon says tightly.

Sansa steals a glance. His eyes are distant and Sansa knows he’s retreated into his mind, his lonely haven. She keeps speaking, if only to draw him out again.

“I think by sending me he’s trying to bring you into his better graces.”

 _Better, but not good_. All her life Sansa’s allowed others to shield her, beginning with her older brothers. Now she wants to shield Jon.

“I’m not certain when he’ll send for me again,” Sansa adds. “I’ve almost started to think like him, but sometimes it’s like he’s eight steps ahead of me, and I can’t keep up.”

“You shouldn’t think like him,” Jon says, a hint of protectiveness in his voice. “But thank you for telling me.”

It takes him a moment, then he turns to her. The set of his mouth is a grim line forged in duty. He looks like a lord.

“I want you to be my brother,” Sansa admits in a mumbled rush, like she hadn’t meant to say it at all.

Jon’s eyes soften. “I am. I…”

His hand stretches but stops, curls in on itself, like he wants to reach out to her but can’t. She takes the initiative, and his hand. Something in the gesture gives Jon the strength to finish his thought.

“I’ll always be your brother. Whatever Littlefinger discovers…do you think it would change what we are to each other?”

When she looks at Jon she sees a memory, colored with good and guilt alike. Sansa sees Winterfell as it once was, with laughing children and one solemn boy caught in the corners. She sees Arya, all long-faced Stark like him. She sees Jon, knows she’s not alone in the world anymore. And she can’t imagine anything taking that away from her.

*

The heart trees north of the wall creak like kindling, brittle strength beneath the building snows. They’re alone and together, Ghost a guardian at their backs. Sansa always prefered the sept to the godswood, but she feels something now, a glow of connection to the weeping eyes. She hears a voice in the wind that sounds like Bran, and her knees go weak.

She gives into the feeling and kneels beside Jon to pray, the faces of the Seven a fading memory.

*

Sansa sits at a long table beside her mother, clapping for the dancing couple. Her uncle’s face is clear but his bride’s is less so, a blur of tears and teeth that glint in the false light.

“Look at them,” Robb whispers in her ear, his voice low like Jon’s. “Someday that’ll be you.”

The words are barely out before a knife bursts through her mother’s throat, a bloom of blood. Sansa’s muscles go rigid with paralysis and she can only watch as her mother claws silently at herself, a vain attempt to stem the flow. At her other side Robb is approached by a girl Sansa thinks is Arya. She steps closer and becomes Alys Karstark, mouthing words Sansa can’t hear.

Then Grey Wind is there, tearing Robb’s head off with one snap of his jaws, and somewhere Lady howls–

Sansa’s shoulders jerk when she wakes, pulse racing through her body. She grips the sheet in her fist while she steadies her breath. Her sweat cools after a few minutes and she shivers, can’t find warmth again. She pushes the covers away and puts on slippers.

She taps her nails twice on Jon’s door to warn him, then enters. The fire has long died but his chambers already feel less chilly than her own. Ghost looks up first, from the end of the bed, then Jon rolls over.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

He looks and sounds younger in sleep, with his hair sticking up in all directions and a curious lift in his voice. Sansa feels a wave of nostalgia that aches like an old scar.

“I’m cold,” she says.

“Yes,” Jon says. “Perhaps you’ve heard the news. Winter is c–.”

She huffs a sigh to drown him out, and his mouth twists in a grin. Jon shuffles back against the wall to make room, and she hurries to lay down. Ghost adjusts to cover her blanketed feet. It’s the warmest she’s felt in months.

“Tell me a story,” she says, folding her hands over her stomach.

“Aren’t you a little old for stories?” Jon asks.

Sansa lets one hand creep forward shyly, fingertips tripping across the sheet until she can graze the crook of Jon’s elbow.

“I think,” she says, “I’d like to pretend I’m not for a minute.”

He twists slightly to meet her eyes, a light in the dark.

“Alright, then.”

They stare at the stone ceiling as Jon spins her a story from beyond the Wall. It’s the dark sort of tale Old Nan once told, the sort Arya and Bran clung to with fat, sweet-sticky hands. It was never in Sansa’s taste before but she’s rapt now. She likes the way the words sound and she mouths them to the darkness.

 _Skirling Pass and dragonglass_. The consonants curl nicely against her palate and linger on her tongue like wine.

Sansa wakes with Jon’s hair tickling her nose and Ghost’s snout under her arm. She feels safe, and doesn’t know why it makes her want to cry.

*

He’s busy most days and Sansa helps when she can, giving advice and lifting her head high when his men have anything to say about her. Jon pores over maps and plots points of advantage over the White Walkers. It feels he’s fighting the whole of the north, like the geography of the land itself is rising to wage war.

 _This is what matters_ , Sansa realizes. All the games of titles and politics seem so silly now. _There will be no seats to fight for if we’re all dead_.

Sometimes he’ll look up from his work. Sometimes he’ll meet her eyes like he can’t quite believe she’s real, his face relaxing as much as it ever does, until one of his men calls his name.

Sansa feels like a thread’s been pulled, and it can only continue to unravel. She can’t go back to not missing him.

*

A raven arrives with a letter at the end of her second week at Castle Black. Sansa considers the mockingbird sigil embossed in wax, then eyes the fireplace in the kitchen hall. She wonders if the letter would burn completely before she could come to her senses.

“Lord Baelish is requesting my return,” she tells Jon when he sits beside her at the table, two steaming bowls in his hands. “He didn’t say anything about you, but I don’t imagine you’ve left his mind.”

Jon stills for a moment, then hands her breakfast. “I see.”

They eat silently for a minute. With the hall full around them, it takes Jon time to let his Lord Commander’s mask fall away, to become her brother again.

“Do you trust him?” he asks.

Sansa snorts, ungirlish, and it makes Jon smile. She can imagine what Septa Mordane would say.

Aimlessly, she stirs her breakfast, and feels her own smile grow dim.

“I find it hard to trust anyone anymore,” she says. “Anyone but you.”

Jon opens his mouth but no sound comes out. His eyes take in her face slowly. It makes her sad, the way he looks like it could be the last time.

“Write to me,” he says. “I want to know you’re okay.”

“And how will I know about you?” she asks. “When you go beyond the Wall?”

Jon laughs quietly, almost all breath.

“I’ve come back once,” he says. “I’d like to see death try again.”

*

A hard shudder seizes her muscles at the gate. The air snaps her skin red, so cold it hurts to grip her own arms. Sansa understands now, all those years, when Old Nan called her a child of summer. She’s never known cold like this.

There’s a nudge like hands in her heart, pushing her to see the other side of winter. Sansa has been made Lannister and Alayne, names to poison the snow. She owes it to her parents to survive, to show them they made her a Stark.

Jon’s there to see her off. Jon, with his blood baseborn, who’s every bit a Stark as her. There’s a twitch of melancholy in his lips that makes her want to cling to him until his smile reaches his eyes.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Sansa says. “I don’t know if I’ll ever–”

Her voice breaks. Last time she left him their parting was unemotional, like passing from one room to another. Now she looks at him and is more afraid than the day she first left Winterfell. Now she knows what she’ll be missing. What she could lose.

Jon steps near and fastens the top of her cloak, tugs it closed.

“If Littlefinger wants me for his games, I’ll be ready,” he says. “If the Others want me for their army, I’ll be ready. Don’t worry about me, little sister.”

The nickname surprises them both. They watch for a moment, eyes wide with what they’ve come to mean to each other. Then Sansa pulls him close, arms tight around his shoulders. Jon holds her, and she shuts her eyes against tears when she feels the slightest press of lips in her hair.

The sky is cloudless, with no flakes to fall and melt in Jon’s hair. She takes it as a sign, locks it tight in her chest as she turns away.


End file.
